Welcome back to a new term

Welcome back to all the Scouts, after a longer than normal break due to New Years Bank Holiday being on a Monday. With the weather still not happy outside we met for the first meeting of the new term. I hope everyone had a great break over christmas and are ready to go for the new term ahead.

We started out with game of hide and seek with a difference. Instead of trying to find another person each scout was given half a playing card an somewhere around the hall and rooms the other half had been hidden. The aim of the game was to find as many matching pairs as possible in 15 minutes with the winner wining points for there patrol to go towards the patrol competition. With the clock ticking the scouts start running around the hut hunting for the other half of cards. As time progressed to help each scout was given two more half cards to find the other halfs to. I think the winning Scout had about 6 or 7 successfully found cards. Which was really good because they were hidden very well.

The main activity of the evening was indoor caving, probably one of the best indoor activities that I can think off. The aim is to construct a cave network that the Scouts will navigate through. Each patrol was had a quarter of the half to design their network, they could use just about anything from the store and the only thing they had to do was line up with entry and exit points for there quarters of the hall. After a few minutes thinking about what they wanted to do it was time to get building. We had about 30 – 35 minutes to construct the network before each section would be reviewed by a leader and tested by a patrol leader. Each patrol did completely different things, some using tables to construct passages while others used chairs tied together to ensure they didnt move. With time passing fast it was time to test them before the first Scout was sent through the complete network.

Each scout was blindfolded and then guided through each section by two members of the patrol that built it. The first section was quite a tight twisting section that was slow to get going before leading into a more open space but with obsticales to attempt to get round. More and more scouts entered the network till just about every scout was in the network or helping people through. Time was ticking away fast and we just managed to get the last one into the network before the end of the evening. It took each scout about 10 minutes to get from the beginning to the end.

I hope everyone really enjoyed the evening. Just one notice for the term, please remember that subs are now due.